Tag Archives: multi tasking

Yes, I know that I’m breaking my “don’t blog about blogging” rule for at least the twenty-seventh time, but – as always- I have a good reason for doing so. Today, I’ll be looking at what to do if you start working on a new creative project, when you’re already creating and posting things online on a regular basis.

I’ve dealt with this subject a few times, like during the five days that I spent writing an interactive horror/comedy story called “Acolyte!” in late September/ early October and I thought that I could offer two useful tips.

1) Efficiency: Back when I was writing “Acolyte!”, I didn’t have as much time or energy to spare for my usual daily articles and art posts. But, although I had a fairly large buffer of both articles and paintings, I didn’t really want to let this dwindle too much. So, instead, I worked out ways to spend less time and energy making art and writing articles.

This is why, for example, some of my articles from earlier this month (yes, my article buffer is several months long) feature recycled title art. Believe it or not, creating and editing the little title graphics at the top of each of these posts can sometimes take up to half of the time it takes me to write a blog post. So, I was able to save time during those five days by just re-editing some of my existing title graphics using MS Paint.

Likewise, many of the articles that I wrote during those five days were either fairly short or they were fairly rambling. I’ll talk more about how I wrote those articles later, but they were articles that were easier and/or quicker to write than most of my articles are.

As for my daily art posts, I’d fortunately started a series of minimalist limited palette paintings (which were posted here in January) before I’d started writing “Acolyte!”. As such, it was fairly easy for me to continue making these paintings, albeit with less background detail, when I was writing “Acolyte!”.

I guess that what I’m trying to say here is that, you need to find ways to spend a minimal amount of time and effort on your pre-existing projects whilst still working on your main project. If you can come up with ways to create filler content, then this can also be useful too.

Although this might seem like a lot of extra effort, it’ll help stop you losing momentum on your pre-existing projects. This means that, once you’ve finished your new project, you can get straight back to working on your old projects again with a minimum of disruption.

2) Similarity: Back when I was writing “Acolyte!”, almost all of the blog articles that I wrote were about interactive fiction. Likewise, most of the art that I made during this time was related to the horror genre too.

Why did I do this? Well, it was both to allow me to write articles and make art quickly, but also to prevent me from losing focus on the horror/comedy interactive story that I was writing at the time.

Since I was devoting a lot of my mental energy to writing interactive fiction and coming up with horror-based ideas, making sure that all of my other projects (eg: these articles and my daily art posts) were as closely related to these topics as possible helped me out a lot.

Since I didn’t have to think about any other topics, I could switch between writing daily blog posts, making art and working on “Acolyte!” fairly quickly. The lessons that I’d learnt from writing interactive fiction earlier that day could easily be turned into blog articles and, since I was already daydreaming a lot about the horror genre, it wasn’t too difficult to come up with ideas for horror-themed paintings.

So, if you’re working on a new project then, if possible, try to make your pre-existing projects as similar to it as you can get away with. Not only will this make you more inspired, but it’ll mean that you’ll be able to jump between projects a lot more quickly too.